DIY Portable Charging Station

As is evident by all of the images and video I create for this blog, and the Youtube Channel; I haul a lot of camera gear around the bush. Storing the camera gear hasn’t been such a challenge, I manage to keep that in some sort of order. But charging the batteries was beginning to come something of a headache with different batteries requiring 7 chargers strewn all over the vehicle fighting over 240 volt power from the inverter, 5 volt power from USB sockets and 12 volt power from the cigarette socket.

Then one day I was thinking about an unused safe case I had in the shed and this idea popped into my head!

Although some of the 5 and 12 volt chargers would be better plugged straight into the 12 volt of the car, I opted to use converters plugged into the power board for the sake of keeping it simple. Now I can simply plug the entire box into an inverter, or bring it inside the house and plug it into the wall.

I know a lot of us love to carry a camera, GoPro and all sorts of battery guzzling gear, so if you like this idea and want to build your own, here’s a few pointers:

Use bloody strong double sided tape to hold everything in place. I used Tarzans Grip Mounting Tape which I obtained from Supercheap Auto. I used velcro squares at first which all fell off pretty quickly.

Get the biggest power board that will fit into the safe case.

You’re going to have to drill a massive hole in your safe case to fit the 240 volt plug out the side, unless like me you are prepared to cut and re-join the cable to allow for a smaller hole

Get twice as many cable ties as you think you’ll need to, getting the cable management happening is the most time consuming part

Look on the back of each charger and add up the wattage required to run the whole lot. Mine is going to require about 300 watts maximum

Let us know if you build your own, and maybe send us a picture with any little tweaks you might have!